1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an apparatus for producing a dough roll in which a dough roll is first stretched by a pair of vertically juxtaposed rollers and then rolled up by a dough piece rolling up mechanism to shape the rolled dough into, for example, a croissant or butter roll. In this industrial field exactly and properly rolled and shaped dough rolls are required to reduce the production costs, because a dough piece that is deformed when it passes between the juxtaposed rollers is discarded as an inferior-quality product, thereby increasing production costs.
2. Description of Prior Art
In producing croissants or butter rolls there has been a problem in improperly forming shaped dough rolls due to the deviation of the center line of a dough piece from the direction of the advancing conveyor by which the dough piece is conveyed. To eliminate the deviation, there has been provided a pair of vertically juxtaposed rollers arranged upstream of a dough piece rolling up mechanism, where the peripheral speeds of the pair of rollers are slower than the conveying speed of the inlet conveyor of the rolling up mechanism, so that the leading end of the dough piece slips on the conveying path of the inlet conveyor, while the rear portion of the dough piece is held between the pair of rollers, whereby the center line of the dough piece is caused to be parallel to the direction of the advancing conveyor. This pair of rollers functions to simultaneously stretch the dough piece to the desired thickness before it enters the rolling up mechanism. However, there has been a phenomenon whereby gases in the dough piece are moved rearwardly by the pair of rollers when they squeeze the dough piece and are irregularly gathered at the trailing end of the dough piece, whereby the rear portion of the dough piece is laterally bent and deformed, when it passes the pair of rollers. Such a deformed dough piece permits the formation of an unsymmetrically rolled croissant dough or butter roll dough.